When people think of historic preservation, what often comes to mind is a campaign to save a singular work of architectural merit. Yet over the years, the preservation community has adopted a wider world view of conservation, one that demands that we step back and consider collections of buildings—...Read more

Spring is universally regarded as a season of renewal—a time for sowing seeds of change. This issue we focus on a suite of sites witnessing dramatic rebirth, two of which are, appropriately enough, gardens, a third, an ancient temple-complex in Beijing dedicated to the worship of Xiannong, the...Read more

Of all the factors that threaten our most treasured cultural sites, few can match the destruction wrought by our restless planet. Its ever-shifting plates, yawns, and sighs cause earthquakes and tsunamis. Its mountain-building schemes change Earth's weather patterns, which affect humidity and...Read more

Few monuments on Earth are as famed as the Great Wall of China. Few know the age-old monument as intimately as William Lindesay, a British long-distance runner who first encountered the wall in 1986. Arriving in Beijing with little more than a pair of running shoes and a backpack, Lindesay was...Read more

Few sites are as romantic and sublime as the majestic, yet crumbling castles and abbeys of Great Britain and Ireland. Though most are but spare renderings of their former selves, they evoke a timeless beauty, a golden age of art and architecture. For all their splendor, however, many of these...Read more

On April 10, the world stood by as war-torn Baghdad's National Museum and Manuscript Library, the latter a repository for some 5,000 of the earliest-known documents, were sacked and looted. In the days that followed, numerous accounts of the tragedy surfaced in the media, yet the true...Read more

Of all the challenges facing the field of preservation, among the greatest has been the replication of ancient techniques or methods of manufacture that are no longer practiced. This issue we highlight tw o projects that have required a revitalization of lost, or vanishing, arts. At Qianlong's...Read more

November is acque alte in Venice, a time when the Moon and Mother Nature conspire to inundate the ancient city, threatening its magnificent artistic treasures. While this season has brought its share of high water, little could compare with the 194-cm tide that struck the city just before sunset on...Read more

For nearly four decades, the World Monuments Fund has been on the forefront of preservation, working to save sites around the globe. For every project we have undertaken, there are seemingly dozens of stories t o be told, of lessons learned, of technologies developed, and of strategies devised to...Read more

WMF in 2000 added its voice to an international outpouring of concern over the pending inundation-<lue to the opening ofthe Birecik dam along the Euphrates River--of Zeugma, an ancient Roman archaeological site in eastern Turkey. In May, a letter from Bonnie Burnham, WMF's president, to...Read more